Intellectual property law is re-ordering our relationships to knowledge, property and power.

The intersection of Indigenous knowledge with intellectual property law has produced one of the more complicated legal and social justice problems of our current political moment. This is partly because the issues regarding the protection of Indigenous knowledge are not only legal in nature but also raise questions of historical injustice and colonialism, and at their core reveal that intellectual property law is a culturally specific body of law that was designed for very specific purposes.

The historical treatment, lack of respect and dignity for Indigenous peoples as peoples and as part of sophisticated cultures with inherent sovereign rights to their cultures, heritage, knowledges and lands is largely what makes the intellectual property and Indigenous knowledge problems that now exist. Importantly, the failure to account and accept difference on its own terms rather than through the narrow Christian and European lenses offered through property law, continue to play out in many ways. Two of these include how Indigenous concerns in the present can be recognized, heard, and treated as legitimate; and how (and whether) the same legal systems that facilitated Indigenous dispossession can be rehabilitated to include Indigenous interests in the contemporary present.